Monday, December 4, 2000

David Gelernter: The Second Coming of What?

In June, 1993, the prominent Yale computer scientist David
Gelernter opened a mail bomb sent by Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who had
singled Gelernter out as a leader of the technological revolution he despised.
Badly hurt, Gelernter survived, and as a recent piece by him, "The Second
Coming -- A Manifesto" ("http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gelernter/gelernter_index.html")
shows, his voice on matters of technology is as strong as ever. But during his
long, painful convalescence, he began what amounts to a second career as
right-wing political polemicist and culture critic. Picked for an unwanted
celebrity by the Unabomber, he became something of a hero to conservatives --
an intellectual after their own hearts, an anti-intellectual sort of
intellectual permanently at war with the liberal types conservatives see as
dominating cultural discourse.

Gelernter's own contribution to conservative theory-building
concerns a supposed transformation of the American establishment after World
War II, culminating in what he calls "the coup of the intellectuals"
during the War in Vietnam, which brought that war to a premature conclusion.
Gelernter describes the takeover by intellectuals as a historic change in
America's elite, full of consequences for how the country is governed. The old
elite, in Gelernter's view, was in basic sympathy with the American masses; the
new, intellectualized elite is hostile to them, as evidenced by its espousing
the alien values of feminism and multiculturalism.

Gelernter is stingy with details about how or why this
monumental change took place. The one event he constantly calls decisive is the
dropping of quotas on Jewish admissions to colleges after World War II. Because
this is the anchoring event of his theory -- "the Jews," he says
"are a dye marker that allows us to trace a new class of people as it
moves into the system" -- it's hard to separate Gelernter's rage against
intellectuals from a rage against Jews.

Anti-intellectualism as a coded form of anti-Semitism is
nothing new on the right. What complicates the picture in Gelernter's case is
that he himself, as you needn't read much of him to discover, is an observant
Jew, friendly to if not necessarily adhering to Orthodoxy. Gelernter's
outspoken Jewishness prevents the inordinate and pernicious power his theory
attributes to Jews from being more widely tagged as the anti-Semitism it is.

Still, none of this would matter much if Gelernter were
merely another left/liberal -- he professes to have once, mistakenly, opposed
the War in Vietnam -- turned neoconservative. But he's more than that; he is a
deeply engaging thinker about technology, as it takes but a glance at the new
manifesto to see. The problem is that you'd never know from his work that
technology itself has brought a new class of people to power -- "knowledge
workers," to use the phrase coined by Peter Drucker. Or that electronic
media suffice to bring about radical changes in society whenever they are
joined to mass markets -- whether or not there are a lot of college- educated
Jews around.

"The Second Coming -- A Manifesto" begins where
Gelernter's first book, *Mirror Worlds, or, The Day Software Puts the Universe
in a Shoebox -- How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean *(1991), left off.
*Mirror Worlds,* the work that likely alerted Kaczynski to Gelernter, contains
what is probably still the best example in recent literature of a technophile
pitted against a technophobe in a debate about the value of technology.

Gelernter's inner technophobe warns that the advent of
mirror worlds -- virtual worlds that faithfully reflect our lives -- will mean
the loss of the sensations that go with real experience, and will eventually
drain our lives of feeling. "The future is clear," asserts the
fatalistic technophobe. "Know everything, feel nothing."

Gelernter's inner technophile replies: "Remember
running, when you were a kid, just for the hell of it? Just for fun? *That's
progress.* That's *forward motion *. . . . That is: transformed childhood joy.
. . When you think of technology, *that's what* you ought to think of. The kid
riding his bike, or sledding downhill, or charging over a grass field trying to
get his kite to fly." Gelernter gives his technophile the last word:
"I think you see much better for building towers, and going fast."

In the "The Second Coming," Gelernter moves beyond
this dichotomy to a conclusion that could satisfy both sides. He maintains that
digital technology will not always disrupt our lives with uproar about
innovation, as it does now. In his view, a mature digital technology will be
self-effacing, allowing people to "return with gratitude and relief to the
topics that actually count." Gelernter proposes that this will come about
by way of "cyberbodies," virtual structures that will house our
"electronic lives." You will be able to tune into cyberbodies through
any electronic device, and with no more no more fuss about operating systems,
file formats and the like than is entailed in turning on a TV or using an ATM.
Conveying elements of our experience to our cyberbodies will be so easy it will
sometimes happen on its own. Gelernter posits a new kind of scanner, an
"all-purpose in-box," that accepts any object as input, develops a 3
D transcription of it, and drops that virtual rendering "into the cool
dark well of cyberspace." You will know the system is working smoothly, he
says, "when a butterfly wanders into the in- box and (a few wingbeats
later) flutters out . . . Some time soon afterward you'll be examining some
tedious electronic document and a cyber-butterfly will appear at the bottom
left corner of your screen. . . and moments later will have crossed the screen
and be gone."

The manifesto boasts the same facility with language and the
same abundance of ideas and fresh angles of attack that mark all Gelernter's
writings on technology. *Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Computing*
(1998), for example, Gelernter's last book, made a case for the indispensable
value of art to the creation of good software. Teach "Velazquez, Degas,
and Matisse to young technologists right now on an emergency basis," he
demanded; the appreciation of art should be for "a scientist or
engineer" what "jogging [is] to a boxer." In *The Muse in the
Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought *(1994), the most sweeping
of all his works, he put forward a theory of mind that both criticized computer
science for failing to include feelings and other "low-focus" mental
activity in its models of intelligence, and made for a fresh approach to
religious mysticism. Not bad for someone whose reputation was built on
breakthrough work in the rarefied realm of parallel processing. Gelernter
brings all of it off with style.

In its sheer energy, these writings recall the boy in
*Mirror Worlds* "charging over a grass field trying to get his kite to
fly. "But as he recovered from the Unabomber's attack, Gelernter developed
another persona -- harsh, harrowed, and more than a little monomaniacal.
There's the trace of a boy in this persona, too, but a boy caught mid-tantrum
and close to damaging himself in fierce displeasure. This posture darkens the
political columns Gelernter wrote for the *New York Post* in 1998 and 1999,
which, in their crackpot zeal -- and minus the humor that leavens much of his
writing -- become painful to read. One column, for example, focuses on a model
of African rain sticks his son brings home from second grade. Rain sticks don't
really make rain, Gelernter duly reminds us; they therefore inculcate a
dangerous disrespect for facts, for science, for "Western civ"
itself. The educational system is tottering near collapse, intones Gelernter,
because of too many "rain stick lessons."

The same penchant for harangue is evident in the art
criticism Gelernter writes for *The Weekly Standard* where you are lucky to get
through a few paragraphs about Titian, say, or the Ashcan School, or Jackson
Pollock, without being taken aside for a severe hectoring. This is too bad,
since Gelernter has a nearly synesthetic sensitivity to paint and color, and
who knows where the criticism would go if he didn't feel compelled to
mercilessly interrupt it with attacks on the intellectual elite he blames for
everything from bad art in SoHo to depraved goings- on in the Oval Office and
decrepit rail transport between New York City and New Haven.

The social theory that Gelernter relies upon is not original
to him, and has gotten a lot of mileage in the last hundred years, though not
from people he would care to be associated with. In general form, the theory is
simply this: There was once a body politic, imperfect to be sure and not
without inequities or internal conflicts, but still with basic values held
undisputed throughout. Along came an extraneous force -- let us call it X --
that insinuated itself into key positions in society, ate away at the sinews of
social cohesion, spread an alien morality, and effected a paralysis of national
will.

A variant of this theory served the Nazis well as a vehicle
for their Volkish rage against modernity. For them, of course, X equaled the
Jews. For Gelernter, astoundingly, X also seems to equal the Jews, whom he
describes repeatedly as the most conspicuous element -- the "dye
marker" -- of the liberal intelligentsia that has seized control of the
central organs of American public opinion. With the dropping of quotas on
Jewish admission to colleges, the American elite, all at once, according to
Gelernter, loses its commonalty with the masses, and is intellectualized. And
this newly intellectualized -- or is it Judaized? -- elite, Gelernter makes it
plain, entirely "loathes the nation it rules."

As did, according to the Nazis, the Jewish elite that trampled
on the German masses. The parallel between the Nazi's use of this theory and
Gelernter's holds, right down to its application in explaining catastrophic
defeat in war. For the Nazis, Jewish subversion of the war effort was the
reason Germany lost the First World War. For Gelernter, the will to pursue the
war effort in Vietnam to a victorious conclusion was stymied, as noted, by the
coup of the intellectuals. Because America suffered intervention interruptus,
Americans are now subjected to shame, disgrace, and an agonizing loss of faith
in our institutions. Nowhere does Gelernter pause to consider the self-disgust
Americans with any conscience would now experience if this country had pursued
the War in Vietnam -- beyond even the 60,000 American and hundreds of thousands
of Vietnamese dead -- to some specter of victory. Nor does he consider the
possibility that, short of Armageddon, the war was unwinnable. It's tough to
lose a war, and very tempting to blame defeat on -- X.

More than one reader was disturbed by Gelernter's X factor
when *Commentary* published his "How the Intellectuals Took Over"
(March 1997). One wrote, "It is surprising to find an anti-Semitic article
in *Commentary,* yet . . . I cannot view [Gelernter's article] in any other
light." Gelernter became indignant at the very idea that he might be
imparting anti-Semitism. The "assertion that my article is 'anti-
Semitic,' he replied, "belongs in a special category. I will not lower
myself to answer it."

But for Jews to propagate anti-Semitism is not nearly so odd
as Gelernter supposes. According to Cornell scholar Sander Gilman (as argued in
books like *Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti- Semitism and The Hidden Language of the
Jews,* 1986), the key decision for Jewish intellectuals in Europe and America
in modern times has been not only what kind of Jew to be, but what kind of Jew
to avoid being identified as. It was in the Jewish identities you disowned and
lent yourself to vilifying that you demonstrated the hold of anti-Semitism. One
of Gilman's many examples concerns the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, whose
response to being labeled "the intellectual" and "the
psychoanalyst (a synonym to the Nazis for *Jew *)" in Vienna between the
war, was to "project those qualities unacceptable in his own self-image
onto the marginal Jews . . . the Eastern Jew and the *Luftmensch.*" As
noted, Gelernter's public stance is as an observant Jew. His ceaseless attack
on the corrosive effects on the body politic of the intellectuals -- those
other Jews, the secularizing ones -- speaks for the continuing relevance of
Gillman's analysis.

In *Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber* (1997), his
account of his convalescence, Gelernter apologizes for the social theory he has
just put forward, writing: "My analysis of modern U.S. culture in terms of
a takeover by intellectuals is too overloaded with passion to resemble any
normal, proper theory . . . The theorizing was done under stress and the
niceties were not observed. Maybe the whole thing is not good." There's no
question that Gelernter was in anguish when he put this theory forward, but, as
a remorseless critic of the cult of victimhood, he would presumably not want to
be humored or patronized on that account. His conservative comrades have done
him no favor by almost entirely exempting his theory from the criticism it
deserves. But, in fact, "the whole thing is not good." It's awful. If
it were a computer program, Gelernter would know it was awful when it refused
to compile, or, if it did compile and run, when it wrecked his system. In fact,
for a glimpse of a true source of today's perplexities about basic questions
Gelernter might look to his own profession. You can't build mirror worlds
without sowing doubts about morality, property, and the nature of reality
itself. Gelernter is an agent of the modernity he condemns. But the endlessly
repeated theory of "the coup of the intellectuals" stands in the way
of him ever getting a grasp on the forces shaping America today. And it taints
his extraordinary gifts.